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Comment by stinos | Hacker News Reader

Most flowering dicotyledonous plants don't make fruits or seeds without pollinating insects

Is it really 'most' (I honestly don't know, I've never considered only looking at dicotyledonous plants)?

In any case: I'm very well aware of how dramatic the decline is, but imo there are more than enough 'if all the bees die we die as well' memes out there and perhaps it's a pet peeve of mine but that's a correlation at best and it ignores so many nuances it's not funny anymore (not that it ever was, but you get the point). It's HN so let's not ignore all other pollinators (wasps, flies, butterflies, moths, beetles, bats, spiders, birds, ... in no particular order - and of which I know many people actually go like 'erm, what, bats?'), nor that there's also wind pollation, and also not the fact that there's a bunch of crops whos yield doesn't depend on pollinators at all and another bunch who'd see dercreased yield without pollinators but not quite zero.

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My point was merely that bees are the charismatic pollinators. The ones people know.

Yes, there are many others. Most of them are in rapid decline too. For instance bats have "white nose syndrome" causing mass die-offs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-nose_syndrome

Birds are dying in droves worldwide.

N America: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1805123115 https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/bring-birds-back/

France: https://phys.org/news/2018-03-bird-populations-french-countr...

Compare with amphibians, also collapsing worldwide: https://www.dcceew.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/c-di...

Almost all wild mammals are gone bar a few percent: https://xkcd.com/1338/

It is a sweeping generalisation, and so are dicots vs monocots.

But the familiar monocots are grasses, which are wind-pollinated. Many dicots are wind-pollinated, including a lot of temperate zone trees, but the familiar useful ones are, generalising wildly, insect-pollinated.

Non-angiosperms (gymnosperms, ferns etc.) are either wind pollinated, or don't make pollen and reproduce via spores, often via an intermediate sexual generation.

As has often been noted, after WW3, the mosses will be fine.

> bees are the charismatic pollinators

Heh, I like that description

>> Most flowering dicotyledonous plants don't make fruits or seeds without pollinating insects

> Is it really 'most' (I honestly don't know, I've never considered only looking at dicotyledonous plants)?

Flowering plants is way smaller domain than dicos plants and flowers use insects (or lucky burst of wind) as the only way to make a new organism, I mean a new DNA.

> Flowering plants is way smaller domain than dicos plants

It's the other way round. Dicots are a sub-domain of angiosperms (flowering plants).

There are lots and lots of flowering plants. All (bar a rounding error) make seeds. Some of the seeds have 1 seed leaf (cotyledon), so are called monocotyledonous plants: monocots. The others have 2 cotyledons: dicotyledonous plants, or dicots.

Some monocots use insect pollination and some make edible fruit. Bananas and coconuts are monocots. All cereals (except some false cereals like buckwheat) are monocots, but all are wind-pollinated. Hand-wavey generalisation: most monocots are wind-pollinated, and don't need insects.

Many dicots use wind pollination, but most of the ones that make fruit we can eat are insect-pollinated. Some plants are self-fertile and don't need to be pollinated at all (e.g. dandelions). Some can be bred to be that way. If insects disappear it doesn't mean all fruit will.

But OTOH it's not just about pollination. Insects do much more than that. They are also vital in decay, in the soil, in turning dead plants back into soil. No insects means much slower decay, means soil that's much less fertile, means plants grow much more poorly, means more crop failures.

Yes ! However, Conifers are not part of that group, and therefore "less" affected.

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